MacDiarmid, Hugh, 1892-1978 (Scottish poet)

Dates

• Existence: 11 August 1892 - 9 September 1978

Biography

Hugh MacDiarmid, the pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, was born on 11 August 1892 in Langholm, Dumfriesshire. He was educated at Langholm Academy, then at Broughton Junior Student Centre in Edinburgh prior to studying at Edinburgh University. After wartime service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915-20, in Salonika, Italy, and France, he became a journalist in Montrose, Angus. There he worked for the Montrose Review and edited three issues of the first post-war Scottish verse anthology Northern Numbers (1921-23). In 1922 he founded the journal Scottish Chapbook, advocating the revival of Scottish literature. In 1929, he worked on Vox in London, and in 1930 was living in Liverpool, working as a public relations officer. Another spell in London followed. In 1933 Grieve moved to Whalsay in the Shetland Islands, staying there until 1941. In these wartime years, he worked as a manual labourer on Clydeside, 1941-43, and then on British merchant ships engaged in estuarial duties, 1943-45. After the Second World War, he lived in Glasgow, Strathaven in Lanarkshire, and then from 1951 in Biggar on the upper Clyde.

As a poet, MacDiarmid was the pre-eminent Scottish literary figure of the 20th century, and was the leader of the Scottish literary renaissance, the movement that sought to revitalize Scottish writing by fusing the heritage of the medieval makers and an international, modernist outlook. In the 1920s, MacDiarmid rejected English in favour of Lallans, a hybrid or ‘synthetic’ Scots, in which he wrote his masterpieces Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), and To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930). Soon recognized as the major Scots-language poet since Burns, MacDiarmid inspired other poets such as Sydney Goodsir Smith and William Soutar to take up Scots as a literary medium.

In the 1930s, however, MacDiarmid returned to English in Stony Limits (1934) and Second Hymn to Lenin (1935), rejecting the lyricism of his early volumes in a favour of an austere, philosophical diction. In his post-war poetry, he increasingly shunned the personal and subjective in favour of open-ended epics such as In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961) which celebrated political and scientific materialism. MacDiarmid continue to inspire younger Scottish poets and in the 1950s and 1960s was at the heart of the group, including Sydney Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown, which met in Edinburgh's legendary literary pub, Milne's Bar.

MacDiarmid combined literary and political activism. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland (one of the predecessors of the current Scottish National Party) in 1928 but left in 1933 due to his Marxist-Leninist views. He joined the Communist Party the following year only to be expelled in 1938 for his nationalist sympathies. He would subsequently stand as a parliamentary candidate for both the SNP (1945), and British Communist Party (1964) after re-joining the party in 1957. As a follower of the Scottish revolutionary socialist John Maclean, he saw no contradiction between international socialism and the nationalist vision of a Scottish workers' republic, but this ensured a fraught relationship with organized political parties.

He had a daughter, Christine, and a son, Walter, by his first wife Peggy Skinner. He had a son, James Michael Trevlyn, known as Michael, by his second wife Valda Trevlyn (1906-1989). MacDiarmid continued to write well into the 1970s but died of cancer in Edinburgh on 9 September 1978.

Source: About Hugh MacDiarmid (2019) https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/library-museum-gallery/crc/research-resources/scottish-literature/macdiarmid/macdiarmid [Accessed 20 September 2021]

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